The American film industry and the Los Angeles district that gave it a name — where, from the 1910s, vertically integrated studios (many built by Jewish immigrant entrepreneurs) turned storytelling into an assembly line, controlling production, distribution, and theaters. Hollywood became the dominant force in world cinema, selling a glossy image of America to the planet. Its record is shadowed: the Production Code censored content for decades, the Red Scare blacklist destroyed careers, and the industry has a long history of racial exclusion, gender discrimination, and off-screen abuse.
It is the factory that manufactures the world's dreams. In the 1910s, filmmakers fled west to a dusty Los Angeles suburb for its sunshine, its cheap land, and its distance from the patent lawyers Thomas Edison sent to shut them down. Within a generation, a few studios there had turned storytelling into an assembly line, stamping out films and movie stars the way Detroit stamped out cars. Many of those studios were built by Jewish immigrants who had been shut out of older American industries and who, in the dream business, invented a glossy America that did not fully welcome them. Hollywood sold that America to the planet. It also censored itself for decades, blacklisted its own during the Red Scare, and shut nonwhite faces out of its stories for generations. The dream factory was always two things at once: one of the country's most influential cultural exports, and one of its most revealing mirrors.